According to a weekly poll by AnimeCorner, Lycoris Recoil is one of the most, if not the most, popular anime for Summer 2022. When this article is written, we are in the 8th week of Summer, and Lycoris Recoil has claimed the top spot for 6 out of those 8 weeks. For the two weeks when Lycoris Recoil failed to be the first, it barely fell to the third position.
One thing worth noting, however, is the fact that Lycoris Recoil is a brand-new series from A-1 Pictures. It’s not a sequel like the new season of Overlord, nor is it a new anime adaptation from a popular manga like Call of the Night. This means Lycoris Recoil doesn’t have a pre-existing audience that can’t wait to see the new anime, and yet they somehow manage to hit a home run with it. So let’s explore some of the reasons that might explain Lycoris Recoil's massive popularity.
Cute Girls With Guns
One of the themes in Lycoris Recoil that is responsible for some part of the popularity that it has received is the good old “Cute girls with Guns.” This is one of the most popular themes in anime and almost every anime that uses this theme ended up becoming popular.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica did it and achieved massive success. Sword Art Online did an arc of it and it was so successful they ended up creating a whole spin-off based on it called Gun Gale Online. Even when they pair cute girls and tanks like Girls Und Panzer, it still ended up as a massive success.
There’s something about the contrast between cute anime girls and firearms that is so thrilling and interesting to see. When we see the cute girls that usually handle magic and healing in Isekai anime now shooting semi-automatic pistols with a silencer on to kill some bad guys in Lycoris Recoil, the audience’s excitement seems to immediately go through the roof.
Hot And Cold Pairs With A Twist
Hot and Cold pairs are a staple in almost every action-shounen anime ever. It simply means a duo where one is a hot head while the other is calm and composed. Think Goku and Vegeta, Naruto and Sasuke, and Yuuji Itadori and Megumi Fushiguro, just to name a few. In most anime that utilize these tropes, the hot-head one is usually a careless muscle head who acts first before thinking, while the cool-headed one is usually the one who formulates plans and often broods.
Things are a bit different in Lycoris Recoil though. Technically, Chisato and Takina are prime examples of the Hot and Cold pair with Chisato being the loud mouth and energetic one, while Takina is the calm and brooding one. However, when they are on a mission, Chisato is clearly the more levelheaded and insightful one, while Takina is the one who is actually quite reckless and would do anything to kill the target.
This creates a great blend of familiarity and novelty at the same time. And it also brings something surprising and refreshing to the audience that is already so used to seeing this type of pairing in their favorite anime. As a nice addition, it also offers a chance to develop the characters.
Thrilling Yet Easy Going
Lycoris Recoil has a knack to alternate between a laid-back, and easy-going atmosphere, especially when the characters interact with each other in the café, to a thrilling action sequence where Chisato dodge a flurry of bullets while Takina aimed for the surveillance drone that hovers above them.
No matter how exciting a battle scene may be, if that’s all the viewers see from beginning to end, it will get stale rather quickly. Likewise, even if you like slow-paced, slice-of-life anime, it doesn’t take a long time for it to feel boring, and you find yourself wanting something dramatic to happen in the story.
By alternating between a thrilling, fast-paced, action sequence and easy-going, slow-paced, slice-of-life scenes, the viewers can feel the excitement and wholesomeness of Lycoris Recoil in the same episode. That makes the story feel incredibly dynamic and also prevents us from being bored when watching each episode.
So to summarize, Lycoris Recoil use the fans-favorite “Cute girls with guns” as the core theme of the story, they cleverly utilize the familiar concept of the Hot-and-Cold pairs but add some twist to it to make it feel refreshing, and they also cleverly alternate between fast-paced action and slow-paced slice of life to keep the viewers engaged throughout the story. These are some of the reasons that might explain Lycoris Recoil’s massive popularity. But since the series is still ongoing when this article is written, we might notice some new things that may contribute to the series' overall success.
Lycoris Recoil is available to stream on Crunchyroll.